Joe put the car in gear and said, “I don’t want things to be this way between us.”
I scrutinized Joe as he made filler talk about traffic and weather conditions. He had shaved and was wearing new jeans and a new shirt. He didn’t avoid my gaze. But he did seem removed. Was he remorseful? Ashamed? When he asked me questions, I answered with a similar degree of formality. Julie is fine. Mrs. Rose is a miracle. We’re working some leads on the case, but we’re still scratching away at the surface.
Then I turned on the radio.
We arrived at San Rafael Airport in Marin County, where a Gulfstream jet was warmed up and ready to go. We boarded the plane at just about eleven.
Our seats were separated by an aisle, which seemed appropriate. Joe and I were like strangers. How had such a wide chasm opened between us in only two weeks? I saw him in my mind, having breakfast with Julie. Now I wondered if that sweet domestic scene might have been a little show he’d put on just for me. I slammed the door on the memory.
The pilot made an announcement. An attendant checked our seat belts and overhead compartments. Jets roared, and we were thrown back in our seats as the plane lifted off.
Once we leveled out, I sipped Perrier and watched beads of moisture sliding off the edge of my window. Then I put on a headset, dialed up some jazz, and reclined my seat.
Questions flew up behind my closed eyelids like shorebirds on the beach.
I thought about Joe sitting across the aisle from me, a virtual stranger who had, by the way, shared a significant part of my life. I wondered if a few months from now we’d be divorced and I’d be living in a new place, or if it would be me and Julie in Joe’s apartment, surrounded by the memories of happier times.
I thought about Ali Muller: her marriage, her children, her still-undefined role in the hotel murders; and I revisited the images of her with Michael Chan—and that was when those pictures in my mind collided with my experience at the actual crime scene. Something didn’t jibe.
And then I grabbed that nagging notion by the toe and didn’t let go until it took form.
Michael Chan was shot in the face and chest and he dropped with his feet facing the door. How could Ali Muller have shot him from the doorway when she was behind him in the room?
Had she been working with an accomplice? Had someone else shot the housekeeper, knocked on the door, and shot Chan? Had this unknown killer then shot the two techs in the room next door?
I knew for sure that Joe had told Bud he was coming upstairs. The murders had gone down after that.
Had Joe shot the two kids who’d been expecting him to knock on the door? Was he Alison Muller’s partner in these gruesome crimes? After the killings, had it been Joe who had gotten her out of the hotel unseen?
But why? If Joe was partnered with Muller, why would he ask me to come with him to bring her in?
Was I walking into a trap?
My eyelids flew open as my mind violently rejected this idea. No, no, Joe wouldn’t, couldn’t, set me up in order to kill me. Could he? I turned to look at my husband, who was five feet away, sleeping like a lamb. Who was the real Joe?
It was a short flight. I didn’t eat. I didn’t sleep. When the FASTEN SEAT BELTS light flickered on, I gripped the armrests and braced myself for violence.
The landing was smooth.
I walked shakily down a flight of metal steps, and Joe took my arm as, with our heads lowered, we crossed the chilly, breeze-whipped tarmac at Vancouver International.
I liked the feel of his hand enclosing my upper arm. Tears slipped out of the corners of my eyes. They were from the wind and so slight that I didn’t even have to wipe them away.
We waited inside Avis for the paperwork to chug out of the printer. I tapped my fingers on the counter.
Joe said, “Lindsay. I can’t prove it, but I believe that Ali Muller killed those four people in the hotel, and if she did, I have to take her down.
“If you aren’t up for this, tell me now, and I’ll leave you at a hotel. I don’t want you to get hurt again.”
“I want to catch her as much as you do,” I said, keeping my expression and my tone neutral. Actually, I was telling the truth. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I can take care of myself. I’m a cop. Job first.”
CHAPTER 86
JOE TOLD ME that our route from the airport would take us up the Sea to Sky Highway to Brackendale, about an hour-and-twenty-minute drive.
I strapped in and watched as the lighted roadways took us north through Vancouver’s downtown, over the fork of the Fraser River, and north along Granville Street, where the beautifully lit glass skyline unfurled before our car as we crossed the bridge to downtown Vancouver.
We turned left onto Georgia Street and into the tree-lined Stanley Park, and about then, my eyes closed. When I woke up, the dazzling nighttime cityscape was gone and we were driving through the darkest night.
Joe said, “Everything’s OK.”
He used to say that when I bolted awake, startled by a terrible dream.